On the Pleasure Principle1

What pleasure can psychoanalysts talk about? Pleasure takes many forms: there is the pleasure of the senses and that of the intellect; aesthetic pleasure and ecstatic pleasure; there is also a «pathic» pleasure, which is not always so pleasant. There is a pleasure that is wellness, harmony with one's own body and with oneself, euthymia; and there is a pleasure that is uneasiness, discord between one's body and oneself, dysthymia. In investigating the multiple forms that pleasure can take, we should therefore aim to understand the principle which gives rise to these forms, because this is what every investigation sets out to do: to bring the variable phenomena that are presented to our perception back to a meta-phenomenal principle which allows them to be explained.

Freud posited as «pleasure principle» (Lustprinzip) the sex drive; and he had placed this principle at the «roots» of psychic life in its conflictual relationship with the Realitätsprinzip. Therefore, he had developed a theory which explained the «affects» of pleasure and unpleasure as the psychic derivatives of somatic quantities; from which in turn were derived the ideational processes and cognitive functions through a long and complicated work of mediation between the demands of the body and those of the outside world: psychic reality, in other words, as a product of the dramatic conflict between the biologikòs kosmos and the exoterikòs kosmos.

This is why we should address this conception, so that we can say whether or not this is what we are still referring to.

The comparison starts with the name chosen by Freud, which is not Vergnügen, or Freude, delight, contentment, the wellbeing of the soul; but Lust, craving, excitation, Affekt, which «manifests itself essentially in motor (secretory and vaso-motor) discharge resulting in an (internal) alteration of the subject's own body without reference to the external world» (Freud, 1915). And for Freud, the persistence of this excitation, the inhibition of its